This volume addresses the issue of freedom in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. This is all the more challenging in that Deleuze-Guattari almost never use the term freedom, preferring instead, the concept of the refrain. The essays collected in the volume show that freedom has been understood in a remarkably narrow sense and that in fact freedom operates as the refrain in every realm of thought and creation. The motivating approach in these essays is Deleuze-Guattari's emphasis on the irreality of media and capitalistic sign regimes, which they perceive to have taken over even the practices of philosophy, the arts, and science. By offering a clear and engaging treatment of the underexplored issue of freedom, this volume moves the discussion of Deleuze-Guattari's philosophy forward in ways that will appeal to researchers in Continental philosophy and a wide range of other disciplines.

Dorothea Olkowski is Professor and former Chair of Philosophy, Director of Humanities, and Director of Cognitive Studies at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, USA. She is the author or editor of ten books including Postmodern Philosophy and the Scientific Turn (2012), The Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible) (2007), and Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (1999).

Eftichis Pirovolakis is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Peloponnese, Greece. He works on twentieth-century continental philosophy and, more specifically, on the relation between phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction. Pirovolakis has published articles in, among other journals, Philosophy Today, Word and Text and Literature, Interpretation, Theory. He is the author of Reading Derrida and Ricoeur: Improbable Encounters between Deconstruction and Hermeneutics (2010).

Introduction: Freedom's Refrains, Deleuze, Guattari, and Philosophy

Dorothea Olkowski

Translator's Prologue

Constantin V. Boundas

Part I: Infinite Speeds and the Machine

1. Deleuze and the Freedom of the Machines

Jean-Clet Martin

2. Infinite Speeds and Practical Reason: A Kinematics of the Concept in What is Philosophy?

Michael Ardoline

Part II: Philosophy and Language

3. Try Madness: Creation and the Crystalline Brain

Dorothea Olkowski

4. Sense and Literality: Why There Are No Metaphors in Deleuze's Philosophy

Daniel W. Smith

5. Who are Deleuze's Conceptual Personae?

Gregg Lambert

Part III: Beyond Politics

6. Kafka and Melville: The Same Struggle for a People to Come?

Catarina Pombo Nabais

7. Affective Politics and "Crisis": The Examples of the HIV-positive Women's Public Denouncement and of the Refugees' Confinement

Sotiria-Ismini Gounari

8. Political Improvisation and "the Long March through the Institutions"

14. Affirmations of the False and Bifurcations of the True: Deleuze's Dialetheic and Stoic Fatalism

Corry Shores

"The essays here are carefully wrought and thought-provoking, and will reward experienced readers with either clear restatements of established points (no mean feat with thinkers as difficult as Deleuze and Guattari) or with new approaches (also noteworthy now that Anglophone scholarly work on, or inspired by, Deleuze and Guattari, is well into its third decade). In other words, the collection is useful both in its "centripetal" function of deepening our understanding of some familiar points and in its "centrifugal" function of pointing us outward into multiple discourses and practices into which Deleuze scholarship can lead." - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"This is a highly innovative and provocative engagement with Deleuze's thought that opens up new possibilities of thinking not only about the idea of freedom but also life in a political community." - Andreja Zevnik, University of Manchester, UK

"This outstanding collection sheds new light on key Deleuzean concepts and on the concepts of freedom implicit in the work with Guattari. It includes new work by several leading Deleuze scholars that significantly advances the understanding and development of Deleuzean philosophy." - Paul Patton, University of New South Wales, Australia